Friday, January 25, 2019

What Do You Do With Your Pictures?

The cool and rainy weather afforded us time to perform a long procrastinated task; organizing our photographs. When we were preparing for our life on the road we vowed to get rid of as much as possible. We did not know how long we were going to be on the road and did not want to pay monthly storage fees for years, maybe even decades.

The furniture was the easiest to get rid of as we did not have any family heirlooms other than a grandfather clock which is on loan at our son’s house and a gun safe at my brothers. The old personal pictures or mementoes from ours or our parents’ childhoods were the hardest. Some, like high school albums we got rid of altogether while others we passed on to our children to do with them what they wished. After all, they were going to get them at some point anyway. 
One of the hardest things to decide what to do with was the old photographs. They were too numerous and bulky to take on the road and we did not want to burden our children with storing them. So instead, we scanned them; all the photographs of our immediate family growing up as well as those passed on to us from our parents and other relatives. 
Barb's 4th Grade Class Picture circa 1968
A closer look shows a cute little Barbie on the far right.
What's that on her desk?

We scanned and stored them on various SD card and sticks in no real organization in mind. Even with that done we just could not get ourselves to throw away the originals so ended up burdening our daughter with them telling her to do with them what she wished. To this day we don’t know if she still has them and we are not going to ask. 
Me (l) and my brother Rod (r) circa 1967
It just dawned on me that I was not even in kindergarten when the above picture of Barb was taken!
So here we are with thousands of pictures covering decades and decades on storage devices, what to do with them? How do you organize them? We decided to put them into folders by years which is easy for some, much more difficult for others. It is fairly easy to guess the year on pictures with our kids in it but when it comes to old pictures of our parents, pictures of ourselves or just adults, it becomes a guessing game. Nonetheless, we went through thousands of pictures one by one placing them into what we felt was the right folder. 
Still just as cute circa 1970
It was fun to see all the old memories but also frustrating at times when we could not figure out when one was taken. 
Barb guessed the date on this picture to be 2010 based on the boots she was wearing.
Who knows what boots they wore what year?????
Even I used to get into the action but I had to totally guess at the date late 80's early 90's
We are now 90% there, feel pretty good about where we are and have them stored on several external hard drives should one fail. To Barb’s credit she has been very good about organizing our pictures since we have been on the road by year, month, and day which has made recent pictures much easier.
This is how we organize them since being on the road
On the days we could get out on the water we took full advantage of it. I got out fishing three times this week (Barb got out twice) from both on shore and on the water. The biggest fish of the week goes to...…. Me! With this 9lb channel cat.
The most fish award goes to Barb as she just slaughtered them when we went out in our kayak where Withlacoochee River dumps into the Gulf. We caught flounder, red fish, ladyfish, silver perch, and speckled  trout.
Getting ready!

Barb's first flounder!

Fish on!

Shrimp boat headed out to the gulf
Fishing out of a kayak is a little more challenging than in a boat. While Barb did most of the fishing I was trying to hold our place or keep us away from shore. We learned a lot and next time we will set things up a little differently.
Nice little Red Fish
Another day when Dan and I were fishing Barb and Jeanie went to an Accordion Club that Jeanie belongs to. Barb said it was very interesting and has even mentioned that she is going to get her dad's accordion! Here is a short video of what the club was like.....

They also stopped by the Williston Peanut Plant. The pictures are very interesting and resemble grain elevators of those in North Dakota.....



Last but not least, we received a message from a couple we met up in Alaska in '16! Mike and Liz live in nearby Citrus Springs and asked if we wanted to get together for a beer. Since they are locals they know all the good spots. We met them at Copp Brewery in Crystal River. They have excellent beer there and both Barb and I were very impressed. Then it was on to the Old Mill Tavern in Homosassa where they have 50+ chicken wing flavors...... Both were very good and it was great to get together with them again!
Overall it was a great week with a good mix of adventures and accomplishments. If you have any suggestions on how to organize pictures feel free to leave a comment. Two weeks down and two weeks left here in the Yankeetown area, who knows what kind of adventures trouble we can get into!

29 comments:

  1. Watch out Jim...she’ll lure you in with those dimples, but that’s Chuckie on her desk. 🤡

    Best way I’ve found to organize is by date...year, month, then day. Today would be 20190125. From there, you can set up an Excel spreadsheet and organize it any way you want.

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    1. Too late, those dimples got me from day 1 but I sure wished I would have known that Chuckie was her alternate personality!

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  2. Love the childhood photos!! Barb certain was (and still is) so adorable:) Great photo in the roller skates. Glad you got in some fishing. You certainly haven't had the hottest FL visit this winter so far.

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    1. The good thing about the cooler weather is less no-see-ums the 10 day show nothing over 65 so it looks like it will continue.

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  3. All our photos are stored at a friends in a corner down stairs. and quiet a few of DVDs.

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    1. We have a lot of family movies on DVD's and don't even have a DVD player on our computer anymore. That might be our next project!

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  4. Organizing the photos and videos is a chore we have been dreading but I guess should tackle when we are back on Vancouver Island for a few months this summer. Great pics of you guys back in the day.
    Nice to be catching lots of different species of fish.
    Safe travels!

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  5. Love seeing old photos. I spent the winter before we went full time scanning and organizing all of our pictures. They were already in order so I just made folders as I went along. Don't know what I'll do when I inherit my folks photos, at least they are also organized. Our photos are our screen savers, so cool seeing pics from days gone by. Heard you met up with Mike & Liz, we'll be seeing them in late Feb.

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    1. Good idea having them as screen savers. We will probably see Mike & Liz another time or two before we leave the area!

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  6. Like you we scanned everything by year and put them on a external hard drive and made a copy. Then Lisa couldn't get rid of them so now her mother keeps them for us. Now most of our pictures are trapped on our phones and we kind of quit organizing them. No one is going to look at them but us and I only put a few in the blog for others to see.

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    1. We had a lot in our phone and iPads so we downloaded those as well.

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  7. We just recently got out the old albums out of storage when we were moving into our new house. I took all the pictures out of our albums, my Dad's albums, Ray's mom's albums and my grandparents albums. I took them to Staples and they scanned them all at a reasonable price. Gave me a couple of thumb drives back as well as the stacks of pictures. I ended up going through and moving pictures into different folders, mostly by the location of our house at the time ... we moved a lot. Then I gave each kid their own thumb drive of all the pictures. Like you I still am keeping the old pictures as now I have room to keep them lol I did give all of the old movies and slides I inherited from my Dad and Grandfather and gave it all including the old movie projector to my cousin to turn into DVD's. He will retire in a few years and he told me that is his project as the family movies are of him and his sister as well. Good luck with this.

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    1. Good call having Staples do that. That project in itself was very time consuming!

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  8. My self-assigned “task” for the coming summer is to scan old home videos - UGH! I literally have hundreds of hours - on VHS ans VHS-C. Some are from Bill’s family (his Dad had one of the first VHS recorders - the huge one that sat on your shoulder) but most are of my kids growing up. Should be “fun”

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    1. A few years ago we had all our VHS and 8mm recordings put on DVD's, we should probably get them on some other type of storage device as DVD's seem to be a thing of the past already.

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  9. Just thinking about scanning and organizing old photos has me running in another direction. Overwhelming! You guys gonna be in SD in June? I think we're gonna head to Hayward, WI sometime this summer to visit Al's sister and get in some fishing. We haven't figured out our route just yet.

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    1. We think we will be there in June and if you come through that way you BETTER stop by and see us!

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  10. Sorry, I can't offer any advice on the old photos but I can offer a bit of something for the current and new ones. If you pick the ones you like best for your blog/facebook, why not just get rid of the others. Do you actually go back and look at them? And unless they are all well documented, will you truly remember much about them? I used to keep them all but figured out quickly that I'm too busy to organize and document each one, so I do the ones that I want to keep and post them on my blog and/or facebook and delete the rest.
    The old ones I've kept for the simple reason I don't have the heart to get rid of them. I've scanned them, dated them and organized them as well as I can but....for what? My girls don't care about them, they'll probably just toss them when I'm gone. However that will wait for another day.
    Good luck!

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    1. Good advice, we too have started to delete all but the best ones. We have thoughts that maybe our kids or grandkids will look back at them fondly long after we are gone but who knows!

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  11. We lost all our pictures to a House Fire that was deemed Arson. Not just pictures of ourselves but our children in their growing years with our late spouses.
    Be Safe and Enjoy!

    It's about time.

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    1. That's horrible! Makes me think we should probably make an extra copy and send it to one of the kids.

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  12. Nice catfish! I do think Barb has a significant advantage being in the front of the kayak. Nice of you to allow her that advantage. We may be up that way in a couple of weeks. What is your departure date and where are you going from there? I will check back in the comments or you can email me at ktmissouri@gmail dot com.

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    1. Finally, someone who sees my side! It is definitely an advantage for Barb up front to fish while I am in back acting more or less as the trolling motor keeping us in place. We are in this area until 2/9 but will send you an email and let you know our specific plans.

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  13. I just bought a new 4TB hard drive to help me store all the pictures and dashcam videos we've taken. Organize???? That's a foreign concept to me. We're on track to exceed the picture count from last year's trip to the US. That was 17,000. When we get home we'll make the family sit down and look at EVERY one!!

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    1. LOL, 17,000?!?! That is a lot of pictures and you will be filling up that 4TB in no time!

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  14. Organizing old pictures? Hmm I'm unsure if I will ever scanned them :) But my digital pics for the last ten years are stored on 2 external drive, one in the car and one in the MH, just in case.
    Based on those cute childhood pictures and your current ones, I'd say both of you have aged beautifully and still look the same. And Im going to confirm that personally soon :)

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    1. We are looking forward to meeting you two, see you in a couple days!

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  15. Such cute pictures! Lucky Barb gets to do most of the fishing. Like you, I do most of the paddling so Steve can fish. We gotta fix that! Nice pic of the Cat! We divied all our pictures up to the kids and I kept a few. All new pics are saved in a format like yours.

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